Mind the Gaps: Creating Convincing Crowd Scenes

Shooting convincing crowd scenes is difficult when you
only have a few background actors to help. This tutorial shows how using a long lens can
make things a lot easier: long lenses narrow the angle of view and make a space
appear to be crowded.

We’ll also look a stacking your actors in
layers, so that a large room can appear to be fully populated by the smallest
crowd. This works well when combined with camera motion.

Finally we’ll show how you can
creatively fill gaps, or stage wide scenes and cut rapidly, so that a
small number of extras appear to fill a large space.